Clàudia Gozzi: "I hope people keep thinking that you can't make a living as a cook outside the city of Barcelona"

BarcelonaI interview Clàudia Gozzi (Barcelona, 1990) and Jaime Bes (El Burgo de Ebro, 1992) hours before they cook dishes alongside other colleagues of their generation and profession. We are at the Reversible restaurant (inside the Hotel Indigo) in Barcelona, and the dinner that has led them to move from La Pobla de Segur to Barcelona is called Generación del 25, which brings together the chefs nominated last year as best at the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona. They were among them. As we talk, we greet the others, gathered for the same reason: Fran Baixas, from Franca; Ricard, from El Cup Vell; Jeffrey Ruiz and Helena Termes, from La Cort del Mos, and Robert Lechuga and Esther Gómez, from the future restaurant Arrel, in Mataró.Clàudia and Jaime opened the restaurant El Raier in La Pobla de Segur in July 2022, where they have become a benchmark both for the region and for others due to their excellent new Catalan cuisine.

You are both chefs. Where did you meet?

— In Pur restaurant, by Nandu Jubany. I used to work there, and Jaime, at Koy Shunka. As the owner chefs, Hideki and Nandu, are very good friends, they often organized meals together, and we would go. We maintain a very good relationship with both of them. Mari, Hideki's wife, gives me advice on how to handle the administrative tasks of the restaurant, because she is in charge at Hideki's restaurant. She knows a lot. And I am also the one who has taken on this task in the restaurant.

How did you two decide to open a restaurant by yourselves?

— It was an idea we had, we were mulling it over, but before that we were working. We went to Formentera to a restaurant that Hideki opened; then to Madrid, and just when we were in Madrid they shut us down because of the pandemic. We were supposed to stay fifteen days and leave, and we stayed there until the summer. We thought up a large part of the dishes on our restaurant's menu during all those months locked in an apartment in Madrid.

When did they leave?

— In summer, when the first restrictions ended. We ruled out Madrid to open the restaurant because we realized that we didn't have enough capital to open any restaurant there. Then we thought about doing it in Zaragoza, near Jaime's hometown, where we had a house. And then we thought about Pallars, because it was the place where I had spent my summers as a child. My aunt, a traumatologist from Vall d'Hebron, left everything to go live there, and I had a very good memory of it. It's very green. And while looking for premises, the meat supplier, Carns Bastus, told us that he had a premises in La Pobla.

Is the restaurant where you are now?

— Yes. It had been a bar, called El Raier, it was closed but remained as it was when it was open. We liked it. We removed all the drink bottles from the bar and put in our spices. We kept the ratafia and Calisay bottles, we made a minimal intervention because the bar was a very modern place, with a lot of wood. We opened in July 2022, just in time for the raiers festival. In the restaurant, eight people can eat at the bar; sixteen seated in the dining room.

You kept the bar's name for your restaurant. What dishes did you start with?

— With very popular dishes. Meatballs with cuttlefish, Catalan-style chicken, Russian salad, stuffed pig's trotters, scallop tartare, which was the only novelty at the beginning and that we keep.

Scallop tartare.

— The thing is, the two of us, as chefs, have training in fish; in fact, we've worked in restaurants where fish was the star. And we found that the locals from the region especially asked us for fish dishes, because, of course, they are from the mountains, and they are more accustomed to eating meat. It's curious because we've found that the locals from Pallars ask us for fish dishes; those who come from Barcelona, meat. It was because local customers asked us for more elaborate fish dishes that we started changing the menu.

What dishes do you have now?

— We start with Palamós prawn croquettes and now we have the organic chicken magnum from La Torre d’Erbull, which we bread and fry, and serve with a stick. Hence the name magnum, because it visually reminds you of ice cream. The fact is that we work with local products, nearby producers, nearby vegetables. The only thing we cannot have locally is the fish, which they bring us from Motril (Granada), because that is where we know our supplier. We receive the fish the day after they have been caught.

I know you like the forest very much, and you also make your own preparations.

— We make a syrup from green pineapples. We pick green pineapples from the forests of the region, cut them in half, put them in a glass jar with sugar, and leave it in the sun and open air for a year. Then the sugar turns into a syrup. Tonight we will serve a dish of leeks with yogurt cream and the green pineapple syrup. We also make almond blossom syrup. Also elderberry vinegar; our mustard, which we make with beer from La Pobla. In the restaurant, we even use local pottery, because next to our establishment, we have a ceramist. Jaime is learning to make it. We have realized that Pallars is a very rich region in everything, and look, at first, we were worried if we would find quality suppliers like the ones we had in the city. We have found them, in Pallars, very high quality.

Jaime told me that in his family they have been butchers for generations.

— Yes, we have complete training in this aspect, both for fish and meat. We don't like to pigeonhole ourselves into any dish or any product.

When you told family and friends that you were not opening the restaurant in Madrid, Barcelona, or Zaragoza, but in La Pobla de Segur, how did they take it?

— I hope people continue to think that outside the city of Barcelona you cannot make a living as a cook [laughs]. Not everyone is prepared to live in a village. We are very happy on our daily commute from Salàs, where we have our house, to La Pobla, where we work. I think every day about how lucky we are, because we like the mountains, the greenery, village life, and the people have given us a very good welcome. We opened the restaurant with our eyes closed, and we found that it works, that we are full both during the week and on the weekend. The customers have become friends, because they come back again and again. I would tell you that Pallars is a region that maintains its truth.

With the good reception you have had in these four years, have you thought about changing to a larger place?

— Yes, we will make a change. We would like to have more space, more comfort for the clients and for us. We are staying in the region, and we are looking for a larger premises or to renovate the one we have.

I'm returning to a dish I was told about before, from when they first opened, the stuffed pig's trotters.

— We still have it. This week we have had it: pig trotters stuffed with squid, slow-cooked with a celeriac cream, the ink in the sauce and the squid legs fried.

To finish, I ask you about the wines, which I know is one of Jaime's specialties.

— We really like working with wines from the region, such as the wineries Castell d’Encus, Celler Batlliu, Cota 730, and we also have wines from all over. We find that locals ask us to try wines from other wine regions, while those who come from outside want to try wines from Pallars.

How do you imagine yourselves in a few years?

— We would like to have more hands, more physical bodies to be able to do more things. For example, I make the restaurant's bread, which is also one of my specialties, and they ask me to sell it. If we had more bodies, we would make a bread oven. And in Jaime, a cocktail bar, because they also ask. We would like to grow with other projects, but it's just the two of us in the restaurant, and we do everything from scratch in all the dishes. So El Raier, with more space, is the idea we are working with.